The Monthly Digest

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,531 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2 / 5)

I feel that in the clue for 1d ‘Context’ should read ‘Contest’, although the clue probably works (just about) with either word.

The expected plain puzzle to precede the Christmas special, and overall a slightly disappointing one. It seemed to me a little below the mid-point of the difficulty spectrum, with the presence of three ‘hiddens’ being a particularly generous gift. Although I didn’t feel that the puzzle as a whole was a classic, there were a couple of nice clues, with 32a getting the nod as ‘clue of the week’.

12a Fruit pest, rare thing enveloping most of stem (8)
The five-letter word for a rare or unusual thing is familiar enough, but the stem which must have its final letter removed before being ‘enveloped’ by it was one that I either didn’t know or had forgotten. It’s a CULM.

14a Pair of characters in oyster place changing places for sort of smoothie (6)
I think Azed has got his seafood geography mixed up here – Brancaster is known for its oysters, but Cromer is famous for its crabs. It is the latter place which must have two non-consecutive letters swapped. A pretty weak clue, in truth, what with ‘place’ and ‘places’ being separated by just one word.

17a Mass entering bewildering system, on edge? They’re misbegotten (8)
The usual abbreviation for ‘mass’ enters a four-letter word for the sort of bewildering system that one might get lost in; a three letter word for ‘edge’ follows. The result is a term for children who are misbegotten in the sense given by Chambers as Shakespearean (though the OED suggests that it was more widely used).

21a Nick bits of earlier recorded stuff? Could be Grub Street denizens (10)
The Nick here is Old Nick, the Devil. Another name for him is followed by the first letters (‘bits’) of the words ‘earlier recorded stuff’, the result being a class of people who ‘scribble, write hurriedly or carelessly’. Grub Street, a street in London near Moorfields renamed in 1830 as Milton Street, was described by Dr Johnson as being “much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems” and was often used allusively to describe the domain of needy authors and literary hacks.

24a Stop fumbling after cross comes back – I won’t catch a thing (8)
If you are as deaf as one of these then you won’t catch anything at all.

28a Roman army issue, troublesome flier when holding line (5)
The sort of clue where my Latin ‘O’ Level stands me in good stead, but for those denied the pleasure of Virgil et al the ‘troublesome flier’ which is ‘holding’ the standard abbreviation for line is a PIUM, a ‘small but very troublesome Brazilian biting fly’. In his book Brazilian Adventure, the story of an expedition to search for the explorer Percy Fawcett, Peter Fleming (the elder brother of Ian Fleming) writes: “By day the worst pest was the pium fly, a little black creature the size of a midge, which covered your hands and anything else it could get at with small hard red pimples.”

34a Return of comic dame, central character in Christmas range (5)
The ‘comic dame’ making a return is also known as Mrs Norm Everage. This would be a very neat clue if the ‘range’ at the end didn’t jar somewhat.

1d Stone cold performer turned up leading road race? Context [or Contest] not requiring drivers (12, 3 words)
A three-letter word for a stone, the abbreviation for ‘cold’, a four-letter word for a performer (could be a dab one), UP reversed (‘turned’) and a familiar two-letter abbreviation for a road race on the Isle of Man, all adding up to something which is cleverly defined. I have seen objections raised in the past about ‘race’ being used to indicate TT, on the basis that the Tourist Trophy is a time trial and therefore not a ‘race’; this is a specious argument – a ‘race’ is ‘a competitive trial of speed’. However, you could legitimately argue that the TT is not one ‘road race’ but several.

3d This size, OS, is not right for OU gels (4)
A composite anagram of the acceptable kind. The letters of the solution (‘This size’) plus OS can be rearranged (‘not right’) to form OU GELS, and there is a nice bit of misdirection in terms of the sort of ‘size’ we are looking for. That said, can ‘This size, OS’ in the wordplay govern a verb in the singular (‘is’)? Probably not. Replacing the commas with dashes would improve matters.

6d Surfing tyro got mermaid helplessly rolling about (7)
The ‘helplessly’ here is a slightly fanciful way of indicating that the MERMAID should have her AID removed before ‘rolling about’ with GOT.

8d Tympanist missing entry – rather odd (6)
A straightforward wordplay, but a definition that revives a question that I have asked myself on several occasions: does ‘rather odd’ mean ‘odder’, or indeed ‘rather anything’ mean ‘more anything’? I can find no justification for it; ‘rather odd’ certainly suggests ‘somewhat odd’, but unless you take that to mean ‘more odd [than an implied norm]’, then it doesn’t mean ‘odder’.

9d Food store – see one denied pant for meal concealed (6)
The ‘one’ in the second part of the clue (the wordplay) references the ‘Food store’ (the definition) at the start, so we have a second six-letter word for a food store lacking (‘denied’) PANT and receiving in its place an anagram of MEAL (‘meal concealed’). The use of ‘concealed’ as an anagram indicator relies on the Chambers definition of ‘conceal’ as ‘to disguise’. I think that it is very close to the border of acceptability, and probably in the queue to get in.

21d A number as introduction for unaccompanied wind (6)
‘A N’ is what must be introduced to a word meaning ‘unaccompanied’.

30d Stone that’s reddish-brown with being dug out of turf (4)
The usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘with’ must be ‘dug out’ of a five-letter word for ‘turf’ (which when preceded by ‘green’ means ‘land covered with grass’).

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,530 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2.5 / 5)

The appearance of another plain puzzle this week is unsurprising given that we can expect a Christmas special in two weeks’ time. I felt this one was right in the middle of the difficulty spectrum, although there was a generous helping of straightforward anagrams to help the solving process along. As last week, I struggled to choose a  ‘clue of the week’, but following a re-reading of all the clues decided on 3d. Azed always says that he aims to choose the most promising word for the clue-writing competition, but he can’t have thought much of the 35 other options available here – good luck to competitors with that one!

1a Stick type of net over dyeing material (9, 2 words)
A tripartite charade to start us off, consisting a three-letter word meaning ‘to stick’ or ‘(to) glue’, a four-letter word for a type of fishing net, and a two-letter preposition meaning ‘over’.

13a Small tipple I swallowed? It won’t go far in Dushanbe (5)
Geography is not my strong suit, and I had no idea where Dushanbe was. Such knowledge would not have helped me much anyway, as I would still not have known that the result of I being ‘swallowed’ by a term for wee drink represented a hundredth part of a somoni there. However, I was able to confidently enter the answer based on the wordplay, with a confirmatory check following later.

17a Boss stopping work early (4)
I don’t much like participles with vaguely implied subjects, so I would have preferred to see this written as ‘Work stopping early for boss’; either way, a five-letter synonym (loosely) for ‘work’ has its last letter removed (‘stopping…early’) to produce a word for [a] boss.

26a Invertebrates? Tern tribe’s mixed in with these (4)
A composite anagram, where the letters of INVERTEBRATES can be rearranged to form TERN TRIBE ‘mixed in’ with the solution. But with nine letters cancelling each other out and only four left for the answer, this is far too heavy on the padding for my taste – I feel that the sum of the parts should ideally not have more than double the number of letters in the solution, and certainly not more than three times the number, as here. Since birds are not invertebrates I also find the definition aspect of the clue less than satisfactory.

28a Bud yielding infusion? It was of value in Peru (4)
Probably the trickiest wordplay in the puzzle, ‘Bud’ here is an abbreviation of ‘buddy’, an INTIMATE, and the infusion is MATÉ.

1d Who often joined Daisy having tea? Come off it! (7)
The East End ladies Gert and Daisy were the creations of sisters Elsie and Doris Waters, who brought observational comedy to an era in which audiences were used to comedians simply telling a series of jokes. The characters were hugely popular in the 1930s and 1940s, and their dialogue was so accurately constructed that some listeners apparently thought that they were real people. Winston Churchill was a fan, and two elephants at London Zoo were named Gert and Daisy in their honour. One of their brothers was Horace Waters, better known as Jack Warner, aka George Dixon in Dixon of Dock Green. The solution is the title of a 1979 single from Chas and Dave:

Now there’s a word that I don’t understand
I hear it every day from my old man
It may be Cockney rhyming slang
It ain’t in no school book
He says it every time that he gets mad
A regular caution is my old dad
Rub the old man up the wrong way, bet your life you’ll hear him say…

3d What’s left penned by composer, unfinished, that can be erased (7)
The standard abbreviation for ‘left’ is contained (‘penned’) by the surname of the composer of the music for the ballets Coppélia and Sylvia, producing a word meaning ‘that can be erased’.

6d Seniors sign to accept lads as neglected (6, 2 words)
A four-letter word for a sign or portent is to be paced around (‘to accept’) LADS with the letters A and S removed (‘neglected’. I’m a little surprised that Azed didn’t indicate that these letters are not consecutive in LADS, but since both words are in plain view in the clue he probably felt it was unnecessary.

7d Group in society mostly keeping quiet about ne’er-do-well (7)
Here we have a five-letter word for ‘quiet’ or ‘silent’ (one of several alternative spellings) with the last letter removed (‘mostly’) around (‘about’) a three-letter word for a ne’er-do-well (often indicated in crosswords by ‘deserter’) .

9d Ready for engagement? What Mr and Mrs share is embodied by mostly expensive rings coming up (5)
I’m afraid that with Christmas approaching this has to be my ‘turkey of the week’. I wonder if this clue was revised and what we have here is some sort of hybrid of multiple versions. The idea is that MR (‘What Mr and Mrs share’) contained by DEAR (‘expensive’) missing the last letter (‘mostly’) is reversed (‘coming up’). But quite apart from the repetition of ‘mostly’ from 7d, the wordplay elements ‘is embodied by’ and ‘rings’ are both containment indicators, and only one of them is required.

19d Uproar once created by telly doctor on rearing owls (7)
Initially I  couldn’t see why Azed had included the word ‘on’ here, as it seemed to me that both the surface reading and the wordplay would be better without it, but the linking ‘created by’ could be considered to demand that the two parts of the wordplay be explicitly joined, in a way that ‘from’, say, would not – I think it’s a moot point, but I’m all in favour of erring on the side of excessive soundness. The telly doctor should be familiar to all, but a trawl through a section of Chambers may be required unless you are familiar with BUBO as a genus of horned owls.

22d Sneery, I maligned those labelled ‘kindly’ (7)
A simple anagram; the Furies were a pretty frightening trio, and rather like Voldemort (and Arthur Daley’s wife) it was generally thought best not to mention their name for fear of attracting their attention, so they were euphemistically known as the Eumenides, variously translated as the ‘kindly ones’ or ‘them indoors’.

27d Crack clayey rock, removing soft covering (5)
I suspect I will not be the only solver who worked back from the solution (meaning ‘crack’, as certain troops might be described), putting a P at the start (the ‘soft covering’ that has been removed), and checking the resultant six-letter rock in Chambers. A repetition here of soft = P, also seen in 4d.

30d Seaweed rising up from below grating (4)
The name of an edible seaweed used primarily in Japanese cuisine is reversed (‘rising up from below’) to produce an adjective which can mean ‘grating’, although it more often associated with the sense of ‘stern’ or ‘inflexible’.

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,529 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2 / 5)

I give each puzzle a difficulty rating based on a combination of my own solving experience and the number of clues which I identified as being likely to turn up on one of the help forums. A rating of 0 would be given to the very easiest puzzle (if I were able to write in all the answers in clue order, which isn’t going to happen), and the most difficult plain Azed that I could imagine would be given a 5, so in practice my ratings are likely to range between 0.5 and 4.5, with 2.5 being average. Difficulty ratings above 5 are reserved for special puzzles. It’s a highly subjective thing, though, and I would be interested to hear how other solvers rate individual puzzles in terms of relative difficulty.

This puzzle seemed to me about as close as Azed gets to a potboiler, lacking the joie de vivre of his finest offerings and including several wordplays which struck me as, frankly, a tad clumsy. Not that it was a bad puzzle, just not (in my opinion) one of Azed’s best. I struggled to choose a  ‘clue of the week’, but settled on 24a for its entertaining surface reading. Unusually, there were four four-letter grid entries with no unchecked letters (‘unches’) – some would say that this is non-Ximenean and one unch is required in such entries, but Azed’s view is that the rules exist solely for the benefit of the solver (ie no more than one unch in an entry of four or five letters, no more than two unches in an entry of six or seven letters). It’s hard to see how a fully-checked entry can be anything other than fair to the solver, if not to the setter.

16a Counterpart in part of old Scotland (4)
A double definition, where the familiar word means ‘one very like another’. I wonder if Azed misread the Chambers entry for the second headword as being ‘obs Scot‘ rather than ‘obs and Scot‘ – anyway the term is only obsolete outside Scotland, so either the ‘old’ or the ‘Scotland’ shouldn’t be here; ‘Counterpart in part of Scotland’ would have been fine.

17a Older nippers? Nits with search are removed frantically (9)
An anagram (‘frantically’) of NITS and SEARCH without the letter A (‘are removed’). Handcuffs are informally referred to as ‘nippers’, and the solution to this clue is an obsolete slang term for the very same items of restraint.

19a Wherein hands are put up, left and right, with ending of homily (5)
A degree of self-reference within this clue – although the ‘hands’ are of the farm variety in the definition, the word is carried through to the first part of the wordplay, ‘left and right [hands]’ being ‘both [hands]’; the last letter (‘ending’) of ‘homily’ brings up the rear.

20a Zoom for instance to finish around end of pandemic (6)
A topical clue, but hardly a classic. A two-letter word meaning ‘for instance’ is followed by a three-letter word for ‘to finish’ around the last letter of ‘pandemic’. But the letter selection indicator is the very same word that is given by ‘to finish’ – I don’t know why Azed didn’t opt for an alternative such as ‘conclusion of pandemic’.

24a Desperate character getting charge after parking in a lake (9, 2 words)
In my own puzzles I’ve used ‘desperate character’ for ‘Dan’, but here it’s the definition of a term that literally translates as ‘lost soul’. The wordplay has a word for ‘charge’ (the sort that one might pay to a union) right at the end, following the usual abbreviation for ‘parking’ in A plus a four-letter word for a lake, an obsolete spelling (though not indicated by Azed as such) of a word that might  follow Winder or Butter.

28a Minks etc making sound suggestive of moorland shrub (4)
The first of two homophone clues in this puzzle, here the ‘soundalike’ is fine (a five-letter word for gorse), but the surface reading struck me as weak.

29a Valley skirting tiny bit of Caledonia in Roman province (7)
Unless you are familiar with the province, you need to know that HAET is a Scots word for a whit (‘tiny bit of Caledonia’) and a RIA is a drowned valley much beloved of barred crossword setters.

6d Lady’s man, all out, Sandy’s indication he’s ready for bed? (4)
A seven-letter word for a ladies’ man (or a debonair young fellow) with the letters ALL removed (‘all out’) from positions 2 to 4. The “Sandy’s” is there to indicate that the solution is a Scottish word.

7d US haberdashery giving one ideas (7)
A double definition – the second didn’t give me any problems, but the first I had to confirm in Chambers. It seems that the term (often prefixed with ‘Yankee’) is used in the US to describe cheap, useful articles of some ingenious design, now specifically applied to items of haberdashery (itself a lovely word).

11d Source of egregious mane tailored (for hero)(5)
This clue is what Ximenes termed an ‘offshoot &lit’, where the whole clue serves to indicate the answer, but only part of it (here the first five words) constitute the wordplay. It also appeared to be the only clue that required any general knowledge, an anagram (‘tailored’) of the first letter (‘source’) of ‘egregious’ and MANE producing the name of the valley which the large and ferocious lion of Greek myth called home before it had the misfortune to meet up with Heracles. King Eurystheus had tasked Heracles with dispatching the said feline, which had become a scourge of the area; it was a labour which didn’t sound unduly challenging until it turned out that the enormous beast had an impenetrable golden hide, and that firing arrows at it only served to make it more angry.  And it was pretty angry to start with. Heracles blocked up one of the entrances to the lion’s cave before lobbing an early form of smoke bomb through the other one; emerging from the resulting cloud of smoke, Heracles bopped the surprised lion on the head and then strangled it. This feat of bare-handed lion-strangling put the wind up Eurystheus sufficiently that he communicated all future labours to Heracles through an intermediary, declining to meet him in person. The RSPCA’s response to the events is unknown.

18d Last person expected to close door ultimately (7)
A three-letter abbreviation for ‘person’, followed by a three-letter word for ‘expected’ around (‘to close’ – I complained about ‘close’ as a containment indicator last week, and the passage of time hasn’t changed my view) the last letter (‘ultimately’) of ‘door’. But the word for ‘expected’ is the self-same word that we had for ‘charge’ in 24a, a distinctly undesirable repetition.

22d Money made by sound judgement, according to auditors? (5)
The second homophone (indicated here by ‘according to auditors’), and in contrast to 28a the surface reading here is smooth but the homophone decidedly bumpy, as poor as any that I can remember from the great man.

25d No. 1 statuette, figless (5)
The letters FIG are to be removed (‘figless’) from a word for ‘statuette’, the definition referring to what contestants on Blockbusters used to delight in taking from Bob Holness.

27d Scotch mat clot turned upside down (4)
To produce a Scots word meaning ‘to mat’ or ‘to tangle’ you need to reverse (put ‘upside down’) a word that Browning used in his 1841 poem Pippa Passes under the mistaken impression that it was part of a nun’s attire (exactly what part we may never know). What an utter clot.

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,528 Plain

Difficulty rating: (4.5 / 5)

I give each puzzle a difficulty rating based on a combination of my own solving experience and the number of clues which I identified as being likely to turn up on one of the help forums. A rating of 0 would be given to the very easiest puzzle (if I were able to write in all the answers in clue order, which isn’t going to happen), and the most difficult plain Azed that I could imagine would be given a 5, so in practice my ratings are likely to range between 0.5 and 4.5, with 2.5 being average. Difficulty ratings above 5 are reserved for special puzzles. It’s a very subjective thing, though, and I would be very interested to hear how other solvers rate individual puzzles in terms of relative difficulty.

If last week’s was tricky, this was trickier. A feast (for those with strong stomachs) of composite anagrams and wordplays for uncommon words that themselves contained obscurities was served up in a puzzle that would perhaps have proved hard to digest for a solver unfamiliar with Azed’s cruciverbal cuisine. My ‘clue of the week’ by some margin was 27a.

11a The governor occupies position in list from which twelve were chosen (4)
‘The governor’ here is one’s father, and the verb ‘to be’ means ‘to occupy a position in space’; the solution is shown by Chambers as ‘archaic’.

13a Tussle in the south-west? Local service cut, line closed (6)
Well done if you got this one without a couple of crossers – I didn’t. The wordplay involves the abbreviation for Western Region (a region of British Railways which was created from the Great Western Railway company when the ‘Big Four’ were nationalized in 1948 and which existed until 1992) plus a three-letter word meaning ‘to cut’, with the standard abbreviation for ‘line’ inside. I’m far from convinced that the adjective ‘closed’ in its sense of ‘restricted’ is valid as an insertion indicator – ‘closed in’ would be fine, though of course would not work for the surface reading.

15a Epic hero? King loses first by bog (4)
I read a day or two ago a short self-penned profile of a blogger in which he wrote that he started to get to grips with cryptic crosswords when he realized that the definition almost always came at one end of a clue or the other. Well, this pushmi-pullyu has a definition at each end; the wordplay sandwiched in the middle involves a RAJA (‘King’) missing the first letter (‘loses first’) followed by X (‘by’, as in ‘multiplied by’). The second definition is an Elizabethan pun on ‘a jakes’, a privy; in Love’s Labours Lost, Costard says to the Sir Nathaniel the curate:

O, sir, you have overthrown Alexander the conqueror. You will be scraped out of the painted cloth for this. Your lion, that holds his pole-axe sitting on a close-stool, will be given to Ajax. He will be the ninth Worthy. A conqueror, and afeard to speak? Run away for shame, Alexander.

A close-stool was a sort of commode, and Alexander’s coat of arms was traditionally depicted as a lion sitting on a throne, so Shakespeare is indulging in a little lavatorial humour here.

17a Two signs of wealth maybe creating popular outcry? (6)
Unless you feel that the rich are normally associated with large holdings of mineral aggregates or seaweed, the second of the signs here involves the poetic meaning of ORE, precious metal.

25a Strip clubs: reluctant entering French one, being female (8)
The C (clubs) and a four-letter word meaning reluctant are ‘entering’ the female form of the French word for ‘one’.

27a Group of senior ministers, excluding Rudd, rigidly formal (6)
A very neat clue. The Star Chamber is ‘a group of senior ministers of the British Cabinet, who meet occasionally to decide how government spending is to be allocated amongst various ministries.’ You could argue that Rudd ought to have some form of ‘definition by example’ indicator (‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’ etc), but I really don’t think that’s necessary here – we all know to whom he is referring. The solution, more often seen in its noun form, can also be an adjective.

29a Swell? Crescendo may proceed so (4)
A crescendo may proceed TO fortissimo…

34a Those in the oldest profession, they say, dull as it sounds (4)
A homophone (‘they say’) for ‘prose’ (‘dull as it sounds’).

1d A puff or two might make insecure roof ——— (6)
A composite anagram &lit, where the letters of A PUFF OR TWO can be rearranged (‘might make insecure [version of]’) ROOF plus the solution (the blank); the whole clue does not serve as a definition of the answer, but when the blank is replaced by the answer it forms a meaningful sentence, a little like a Printer’s Devilry clue.

2d Constituent of opium or cocaine inhaled by nostril once? Death mostly follows (7)
Unless you are familiar with the solution, you need to know that NARE is an archaic term for a nostril, in particular that of a hawk.

19d Children (tinies)? So typical of nanny, isn’t led astray (7)
Another composite anagram, here the letters of CHILDREN TINIES are an anagram (‘astray’) of ISNT LED plus the solution, represented by ‘So typical of nanny’, with ‘so’ being used in the sense of ‘thus’. The ‘nanny’ in question is not of the human variety.

20d Either of two Oxbridge colleges acceptable for ‘harmless drudge’ (7)
There is a St John’s college at Oxford, and I gather that there’s one at Cambridge too. Dr Johnson’s definition of a lexicographer (a role that Azed performed at the Oxford University Press) was ‘a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.’ In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce puts it a little more forcefully: ‘A pestilent fellow who, under the pretence of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.’

22d Hall e.g. among number put up, ultra-modern (6)
This clue takes me back to the summer of 1966, watching the England v West Indies test series on TV (with the sound turned down) and simultaneously listening on my transistor radio to the ball-by-ball commentary (broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme, which the following year became Radio 3) as WES Hall and Charlie Griffith gave the English batsmen a very hard time indeed.

23d Quaker? Not unlike one he reveres endlessly? (5)
AS (‘Not unlike’) followed by the surname of the man who founded the Province of Pennsylvania’s (‘one he reveres’) without its last letter (‘endlessly’). Since the ‘Quaker’ in the definition has nothing to do with the Religious Society of Friends, it’s a moot point whether ‘he’ can legitimately be used in a self-referential sense to indicate one such in the wordplay.

24d It’s for lifting potatoes one planted in trench (5)
Once again, you either need to be familiar with the potato lifting fork or know that a ‘grip’ is a small trench for carrying away surface water.

26d Bacteria? Opening of cut on back of head put off (5)
This one involves the OCCIPUT (‘back of head’) losing the letters PUT (‘put off’).

30d Waterfall, one leaving depression (4)
The wordplay here features a Latin word which I think of as meaning ‘ditch’ (something the Romans seemed to spend a lot of time digging), but is also given by Chambers as meaning ‘a depression’. The solution, produced when A (‘one’) leaves the depression, is an alternative spelling of a more familiar term for a waterfall, although anyone who has spent time exploring the Yorkshire Dales may well have come across the word.

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,527 Plain

Difficulty rating: (4 / 5)

I give each puzzle a difficulty rating based on a combination of my own solving experience and the number of clues which I identified as being likely to turn up on one of the help forums. A rating of 0 would be given to the very easiest puzzle (if I were able to write in all the answers in clue order, which isn’t going to happen), and the most difficult plain Azed that I could imagine would be given a 5  so in practice my ratings are likely to range between 0.5 and 4.5, with 2.5 being average. Difficulty ratings above 5 are reserved for special puzzles. It’s a very subjective thing, though, and I would be very interested to hear how other solvers rate individual puzzles in terms of relative difficulty.

By recent standards, this was a tough plain Azed. Only a couple of ‘gimmes’, not many simple anagrams, several hyphenated solutions, and some complex wordplays to unravel. Not as many quibbles as last week, but one or things that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. Again, no clue stood out for me as being particularly fine, but my ‘clue of the week’ is probably 32a.

10a A page publisher inserted on one side in the main, spread with various printing inks (9, 3 words)
Golly, not so much a clue, more an essay. It works out as A P OUP (‘A page publisher’) inside ALEE (‘on one side in the main’, ie at sea), producing a French phrase meaning ‘of the printing of an engraving or etching, with inks of different colours being spread on the plate with paper or cloth pads (poupées) before the impression is taken‘. So there.

13a What shows black unit at last being given pride of place? (4)
This one fell at the first fence in the race to be ‘clue of the week’: an &lit of sorts, B (‘black’) plus a three-letter word meaning ‘unit (or indeed ‘unity’), the E at the end being moved right to the start (‘at last being given pride of place’).

15a Boy holding light from behind archaeologist (6)
A fairly straightforward wordplay, RAY (‘light’) being reversed (‘from behind’) in a common crossword synonym for ‘boy’. The archaeologist in question is Austen Henry of that ilk; between 1845 and 1851 he excavated at Nimrud in Iraq, (incorrectly) identifying the site as the ancient city of Nineveh. He discovered the remains of four palaces dating to the 7th-9th centuries BC, and brought back several large sculptures to London. He published a lengthy account of his travels in Iraq, Nineveh and its Remains, after being encouraged by his friend Charles Alison to “Write a whopper with lots of plates… Fish up old legends and anecdotes, and if you can by any means humbug people into the belief that you have established any points in the Bible, you are a made man.” He subsequently turned his attention to politics, and in 1852 was elected Liberal member for Aylesbury; he served in a number of roles, including Ambassador to Constantinople, before withdrawing from public life and moving to Venice.

26a Traditional pancake, with beaten egg initially, distinctively glazed (6)
I didn’t take issue last week with ‘traditional’ being used to indicate an archaism given that I’d done more than enough nit-picking, but I’m not going to let it pass two weeks in succession. I don’t think that FLAM is in any way a ‘traditional’ word for a pancake; the word ‘traditional’ has a very specific meaning which surely can’t simply be applied to an old spelling not even recognized by the OED.

29a Parrot heading off for mountainous region, in retreat (4)
The name of an Alpine region losing its first letter (‘heading off’) and being reversed (‘in retreat’) to produce a type of parrot.

31a Me and you put in thrust with foot forming country dance figure (9)
Oh Azed, where’s your grammar? “She’s gone out to play bingo”. This is US (‘Me and you’) SET (‘put’) all contained by (‘in’) POTE (‘thrust with foot’), but the subject of the main clause must be nominative, ie ‘You and I’ (or ‘I and you’, if you prefer). 

33a Hot? Not very, with day ending (4)
Quite a neat clue, LEW (lukewarm, ie ‘not very [hot]’) with D (day) drawing up the rear (‘ending’), the definition being ‘Hot?’.

1d Brewery vessel, bottom up, with wood over half of it, inside (7)
The wordplay here involves an informal three-letter word for the bottom being reversed (‘bottom up’) around (‘with…inside’) a three-letter name for a type of wood (‘wood’) on top of (‘over’) half of the word ‘it’ (‘half of it’).

2d It’s a famous dame, sprightly character but not lead in panto (4)
A five-letter word for a sprightly character (almost invariably associated with the adjective ‘bright’) missing the letter P (‘not lead in panto’). The definition needs to be read as ‘It has a famous dame’ (or, more accurately, ‘had‘), Sibyl Hathaway being Dame of Sark between 1927 and 1974. She once said of her feudal rule over Sark’s 600 or so inhabitants: “If I am a dictator, I’m certainly a benevolent one. I prefer to regard myself as head of one big happy family with the Queen, whom we still regard as the Duke of Normandy, as my overlord.”

During her time as seigneur, there were no divorces or serious crimes on Sark – or cars; when Princess Elizabeth visited the island in 1949, she refused permission for a car to be brought over for the visit. The Princess and the Duke of Edinburgh were obliged to ride to the seigneur’s official residence in an open cart drawn by a white horse and driven by a farmer. In later years the Dame acquired a motorized wheelchair for herself and allowed some local farmers to bring in tractors, but was outraged to find that they were being used on the roads, sometimes as taxis for tourists. When criticized for standing in the way of progress, she would reply “What was good enough for William the Conqueror is good enough for us.” 

4d Rustic pair of lads holding post in festival excitement (12)
One of those tricky hyphenated answers (6-6), which sees a HOB (‘Rustic’) and a repeated three-letter word for ‘lad’ (‘pair of lads’) being put around (‘holding’) a three-letter word for a post, in the employment sense.

5d Idle fellow, once with line on river (4)
I didn’t know this word, and the wordplay could equally well have given LESK or LUSK; Chambers confirmed my suspicion that the latter was correct.

9d Head up old copper completes beat as of old(4)
Not the easiest clue to parse, the word ‘completes’ being something of a distraction. The wordplay involves reversing a three-letter word informally applied to the head (‘head up’) and adding the abbreviation for a copper coin in the times before Decimal Day (15th February 1971).

14d Dyestuff to feel as due, treat from Scots as payment once (9)
Very tricky if you’re not familiar with ARCHIL (or ‘orchil’), a dye obtained from lichen. It is followed by a three-letter verb meaning ‘to feel as due’, producing an obsolete Scots term for a treat given in return.

20d Like telly (monstrous!) somebody was watching (7)
The wordplay for this hyphenated (3-4) solution is a simple charade, the first part being indicated by ‘somebody’ and the second by ‘was watching’, but to understand the definition you need to be familiar with the use of the decidedly outdated term ‘the one eyed monster’ to describe the television, which belongs to a time when a 16″ TV screen was something special. Given the more common meaning of the term in modern usage, should you own an 86″ Panasonic it is probably best not to boast about the size of your one-eyed monster, as this may be open to misinterpretation.

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,526 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2 / 5)

Plenty of anagrams and not too many tricky constructions, although several wordplays demanded a modest degree of general knowledge.  I had far more quibbles with this puzzle than with its recent precursors – this can’t be put down to peevishness on my part resulting from a disappointing breakfast, since we have a new toaster which prepared my two slices of Warburton’s Toastie beautifully for a generous application of home-made marmalade. Note that the claim ‘Every word is in the Chambers Dictionary (2014)’ has been mistakenly copied from the Carte Blanche puzzle 2,252 and is a fib (the proper name at 18d is not in the Big Red Book). No clue stood out for me as being particularly fine, but my ‘clue of the week’ award goes to 31a.

2a Poacher: filches cockles with bark? (11)
A simple anagram of FILCHES and BARK which produces a hyphenated (5-6) term for a nocturnal poacher of a particular type, but this clue is notable for the appearance of ‘cockles’ as an anagram indicator. Will we be adding it to the relevant list in our Clinical data section? We will not. Chambers gives cockle³ as meaning ‘to pucker’, but a group of letters ‘wrinkling’ doesn’t suggest to me that they are being rearranged.

15a Love retracing instant in past poetically (5)
The wordplay here involves putting a two-letter word for [an] instant inside a three-letter poetic term for ‘past’ or ‘finished’, and reversing the whole lot. ‘Retrace’ is a transitive verb, so someone or something has to be doing the retracing; this can only be the solution or the solver – neither is entirely satisfactory. But in any event, ‘retracing’ anything (usually steps) doesn’t mean turning them backwards, it means repeating them in the reverse direction. But we knew what he meant.

20a Woman with great admiration for vintage roller (4)
No end in sight yet to the cavilling. This is W (‘Woman’) together with a three-letter word for ‘great admiration’ or ‘reverential wonder’, and a nice oblique definition. But can Azed get away with ‘Woman’ for W? Not on my watch! It’s a valid abbreviation for ‘women’ though, so replace ‘Woman’ with ‘Women’ in the clue and all will be well. He could even have left the first word out completely.

31a Decide against declaring in blackjack? (5)
The wordplay indicates what a cricket captain who was considering declaring his side’s innings closed might decide to do (3,2) if he felt a few more runs were needed. I think Azed probably realized that the definition was a little imprecise, hence the question mark, though both a blackjack and the solution could deal one a nasty blow. Hands up all those familiar with the blackjacks (or black jacks) that came individually wrapped in waxed paper, tasted of aniseed, and turned your tongue black? It seems that the resurgence of vintage sweets has brought them back to the shelves, but I shan’t be rushing to stock up.

33a With troops in lines traditionally, representing command a Tory ignored (4)
A rather verbose definition which wouldn’t be to the liking of some crossword editors, ‘With troops in lines traditionally’ is a long-winded way of indicating that the word comes from the verses of Edmund Spenser and means ‘[provided] with troops’. The wordplay involves a nine-letter word meaning ‘representing [a] command’, with A TORY dropped from the end (‘ignored’).

1d Like ancient cursive script proclaimed in scribbled sheet, look (11)
Unless you know the word, this one is impossible to be certain about without checking the dictionary. It’s an anagram (‘scribbled’)  of SHEET around a four-letter word for ‘proclaimed’ or ‘resounded’, the whole lot being followed by a two-letter interjection meaning ‘look!’, but the ‘proclaimed’ word could potentially have been spelt with a U rather than an A, and the ‘look!’ word with an A rather than an O.

4d Lewd woman making one cry out with pain (7)
An anagram (‘out’) of CRY with PAIN, the ‘lewd’ meaning of the word relating to the ancient times when Cyprus was famed for the worship of Aphrodite/Venus. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the term was regularly applied to ladies of the night.

7d Ivy, embraced by Spanish gent? See her ‘glow’! (5)
This clue has UDO (a Japanese species of Aralia, part of the ivy family) being ’embraced’ by an abbreviation for the title of a ‘Spanish gent’, though I’m a little surprised that Azed hasn’t indicated that the gent has been shortened. The exclamation mark suggests that the definition is a tad offbeat, the idea being that since “Horses sweat, men perspire, but women merely glow” what you are seeing here is “the glow on Ivy”.

18d Garnett, briefly, plus forename – a spell-binding character (7)
The last series of Till Death Us Do Part was broadcast in 1975 (scary!), but I suspect that many solvers who weren’t born then will know of its lead character, played by Warren Mitchell. The wordplay gives us the first letter of Garnett (‘Garnett, briefly’ – a bit iffy in my view, but I’ve nit-picked enough for one week), followed by a three-letter word for ‘plus’, followed by the character’s first name. As mentioned above, the answer is not in Chambers, but should be familiar to anyone who understands this:

Bilbo emerged from his hobbit-burrow one morning to find that while he had been asleep a Tesco Express had sprung up just outside the entrance. That was certainly an unexpected item in the Baggins area.

23d One regularly hailed as ageless dullard, that is coming last (6)
A neat definition, and a wordplay which involves a seven-letter word for a ‘dullard’ or inactive person losing the letters AGE (‘ageless’) and being followed by the usual abbreviation for ‘that is’ (‘that is coming last’)

25d Appear in new form? Art maybe taken up, then English (6)
It was only on second reading that I appreciated the surface reading of this clue (I don’t know about you, but I find that having solving a lot of cryptic crosswords I tend to go straight to the cryptic reading of clues, so the ‘form’=’class’ thing passed me by the first time around.) The wordplay relies on a degree of familiarity with an American jazz pianist, first name Art (Arthur), whose surname is to be reversed (‘taken up’) before getting an E (English) tacked on the end.

27d What naphtha mostly deals with? Treat ash-plant with it (5)
A composite anagram &lit, which doesn’t read too badly but is somewhat flawed. The letters of NAPHTHA MOSTLY can be rearranged to form ASHPLANT plus the solution (hyphenated, 1-4), but the construction is, well, messy at best, and anyone who tried to deal with the pest in question using naphtha would be plum crazy – it’s the flammable hydrocarbon mixture that in my chemistry days we used to keep metallic sodium in; naphthalene would be a much better bet.

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,525 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2.5 / 10)

This is Azed’s ‘Zager and Evans’ moment (probably only those of a certain age will understand that), and to celebrate he has come up with a plain that seemed to sit right in the middle of the difficulty spectrum – the letters to be shuffled in a couple of the anagrams were clear enough, but the required arrangements less so.  My ‘clue of the week’ is 13d.

14a Citizen of sultanate returning very soon? (5)
He or she will be coming back IN A MO.

20a English engraved in tablet for Irish-born writer (6)
No, not Tommy but Richard STEELE (E in STELE). Often considered one of the most important figures in the genesis of modern journalism, the Dublin-born Steele attended Charterhouse (where he first met Richard Addison), and Merton College, Oxford. He founded and wrote most of the content for The Tatler, published in London three times a week between 1709 and 1711, and then in 1711 with Addison launched the highly influential Spectator, which daily entertained thousands of Londoners in the capital’s coffee houses. It ran for 555 editions (each of around 2,500 words) with Addison providing the erudition and Steele the journalistic verve. He had something of a love-hate relationship with London, once describing it as a place where “Gamesters, Banterers, Biters, Swearers, and Twenty new-born Insects more, are, in their several Species, the modern Men of Wit”. He entered parliament in 1713 but was swiftly expelled for supporting the Hanoverian cause; on the succession of George I he was made supervisor of Drury Lane Theatre, and subsequently knighted. In 1722, financial problems forced him to retire to Wales, where he died in 1729. When the floor of St Peter’s Church, Carmarthen, was being levelled in 2000, Steele’s skull was found in a Victorian lead casket inscribed with his name. It had first been uncovered during excavations in the 1870s, and after it was reburied in the crypt no record of the site was kept. As John Mullan wrote at the time, “Its rediscovery tells us not so much of the indignity of being disinterred, as of having been forgotten in the first place.”

21a See this satellite go adrift round edge of space in cosmogeny (6)
Not exactly a composite anagram, but a very similar construction: the letters of the solution (‘this satellite’) plus GO when rearranged (‘adrift’) around E (‘edge of space’) can form COSMOGENY.

31a Song name: ‘Born when it’s springtime in Britain’ (5)
A four-letter word for a song and a one-letter abbreviation for name combine to produce a description for someone (like myself and both of my parents) born between 21 March and 20 April.

4d Bird arranged twig to tidy up nesting (6)
A nice ‘tight’ clue, where an anagram (‘arranged’) of TWIG has a two-letter word meaning ‘to tidy’ reversed (‘up’) inside (‘nesting’). I’m not sure whether ‘nesting’ can strictly speaking be ‘tidied up’, but I don’t think we need dwell on the matter.

8d Glen, David or Jonathan dropping by? (6)
Or Josceline, or Richard, who gave his name to the series of annual television lectures which started in 1972 with Lord Annan posing the question ‘What are Universities for, Anyway?’ Their shared surname is losing the letters ‘by’ at the end (‘dropping by’) to produce a dialectal word for a dell or a dingle.

10d Smash witnessed – hassle separating parts (10)
A four-letter word for ‘witnessed’, the parts of which (specifically the first letter and the last three letters) are being ‘separated’ by a six-letter word meaning ‘hassle’ or ‘confuse’.

13d Newspapers on ER getting out of herself, uplifted to meet the people (10, two words)
A nice clue, with the PRESS followed by (‘on’) HERSELF without the ER (‘ER getting out’) reversed (‘uplifted’).

19d I’m served in the manner of the bargeman’s wife, mustily dressed (7)
A simple anagram of MUSTILY, but a definition that shouts (or would, if it had the gift of vocalization) ‘Azed’: the term à la marinière can be loosely translated into English as “in the manner of the bargeman’s wife”.

23d Keep quiet about debt settlement in historical bailment (6)
To avoid a dictionary scan one needs to know that UTU is a Maori word for ‘recompense’. Surrounding it is the interjection MUM, ‘Keep quiet[!]’.

24d Ride bicycle when damaged: dicey and thus punctured (6)
A composite anagram where the letters of RIDE BICYCLE when rearranged (‘damaged’) can produce DICEY plus the solution (‘thus punctured’).